Our goal is to become an open creative environment, especially for the creation of robotic software, hardware and sensor algorithms.
We are a group of engineers, scientists and researchers. Our interest is in the far future of man-machine interfaces, autonomous systems, artificial intelligence and the like. Our goals include the mining, refining and creation of mechatronic beauty, which includes mixing man with machine. Interested parties can email mainphrame@hotmail.com.

Friday, February 22, 2013

The range is very good through brick/steel in the building. I am thinking that when this thing is outside the building it will have a nice mile range via line of sight. I will do a walking test this weekend to see what kind of distance that we get.

I ordered a 2000mw Wifi booster and +9db antenna for the control laptop and also ordered a bluetooth to serial board to connect the android phone via bluetooth to the serial of the control arduino.

Here is what is onboard RCHL so far:

Chumby hackerboard with WiFi SSH and serial connections to each Arduino, including serial connection via Xbee if SSH has a problem. Autoreset SSH every 2 hours.

Arudino UNO - motor control and IP cellular backup communication for long range control piped to UNO POE serial.

POV and Zoom dome camera - IP controlled.

WiFi router with dd-wrt linksys 54G.

Android phone with bluetooth serial connection to Arduino mega.

60 Amp motor control board.

Optorelays connected to POE arduino to control on/off/reset of each other board.

Optorelay kill switch in a 'dead man' configuration.

Things are getting really fun. This weekend I want to accomplish connecting all of the sensors to the Mega 256 and have that dumping data over the Xbee and back to the control laptop. Cheers to robots!

On the receiving side, Arduino UNO with an XBEE shield in USB mode and then SiRFDemo running in windows to test output. I set the XBEE's to 57600 for their comms between each other and then the GPS is sending at 9600. Works like a charm, one second refresh rate.

Steve also has all of the boards mounted and they are great looking! Nice job :)